President Obama: Get immigration reform done by summer

President Barack Obama hopes to see Congress to pass a major immigration reform bill by early summer, he said Wednesday, as he blamed resistance on Capitol Hill for the failure to get the reforms done during his first term.

“I’m not a king,” he told Telemundo, as he followed up on his Tuesday trip to Las Vegas to unveil his proposals for reform with interviews with Spanish-language television networks. “You know, my job as the head of the executive branch ultimately is to carry out the law. And, you know, when it comes to enforcement of our immigration laws we’ve got some discretion. We can prioritize what we do. But we can’t simply ignore the law.”

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Obama took executive action last year to change the federal enforcement of immigration laws, helping young adults avoid deportation if serving in the military or pursuing higher education.

He said he would push for legislation to make further changes. Though he’s left it to Congress to work out the details, the president said the White House has already written its own that he’ll send for an up or down vote if lawmakers are too slow.

“I’ve got a bill drafted. We’ve got language,” he said.

But he said that he hoped Congress would not force things to come to that.

“I think this is something we should be able to get done certainly this year and I’d like to see if we could get it done sooner, in the first half of the year if possible,” Obama said.

In an interview with Univision also taped Wednesday, Obama said he’s confident that immigration reform will pass before the end of the year. “Si, se puede,” he said at the prompting of interviewer Maria Elena Salinas, repurposing the slogan used by farm workers that was then turned into the English-language rallying cry for his 2008 campaign as “Yes we can.”

What’s still holding back action “is not so much technical as it’s political,” Obama said in his interview with Telemundo, which was conducted by Jose Diaz-Balart. “It’s a matter of Republicans and Democrats coming together and finding a meeting of the minds and then making the case. I’m hopeful that this can get done, and I don’t think that it should take many, many months.”

Diaz-Balart said he’d checked with the offices of Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and other Republicans supportive of the immigration reform proposal put out by a bipartisan group of eight senators on Monday, and that none of them reported having heard from Obama on the issue.